درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Scientific scepticism, fundamentally, questions the veracity and epistemic value of claims not supported by scientific evidence. Motivated by the assumption that only the empirical investigation of reality leads to the truth, the scientific sceptics often maintain that only scientific method is best suited for this purpose. Claims found to be wanting in scientific evidence are considered untrue, and of little or no epistemic consequence. Using the analytical and critical methods, this paper interrogates this epistemic criterion of justification of scientific scepticism. It shows the inherent epistemic deficits in this criterion of the scientific sceptics, and how absolutizing its demands in such a manner as to undermine the veracity and epistemic significance of claims outside the mainstream discipline of science is not only to entrap themselves in many epistemic burdens, but also to sink under the unsavoury weight of criteriological egocentrism, detrimental to cognitive progress. As a credible alternative, this paper explores the epistemic fecundity of contextualistic pluralism – the pluralism of contextually underwritten cognitive positions – in truth and knowledge justification. It concludes with the relevance of this approach in epistemic justification as evident in its inclusive nature as well as its shift of the focus of philosophical thinking from identity to diversity in an interculturality society.  

Regarding the way of facing the West and modernity, Ahmed Fardid is among the thinkers who, by adopting a philosophical and judgmental approach, rejects modernity, philosophy, and western civilization in its entirety. Fardid considers modernity and the West to have an inherent crisis and considers any attempt to patch up modernity with Eastern religions or cultures futile. Fardid, who is the creator of the word “ Gharbzadegi (Westoxification)”, considers human sciences and Western civilization to be nothing more than the inciting soul vanities and blasphemy. By adopting an essentialist and negative approach towards the modern world, he calls for a complete break from the subjectivism and humanism associated with the modern world and a return to Islamic-oriented philosophy (Hekmat-e Onsi). Seyyed Hossein Nasr, as a traditionalist thinker, rejects Western civilization and modernity as a unified whole. He wants to incorporate modern science and reason and take perennial philosophy. In this paper, via a comparative analysis method, this hypothesis is examined that although Fardid and Nasr are sympathizers in the complete negation and rejection of the modern world, Fardid confronts modernity and its consequent subjectivism using Heidegger’s western thought. This is when Nasr confronts modernity from the perspective of a traditionalist thinker who believes in the foundations of tradition. Nasr considers the return to the perennial philosophy to solve confronting the Western world and modernity, but Fardid faced with the modern world, emphasizes that although modernity is the exposure of self-fulfillment, one must strive to overcome it. It is difficult to return to the past.

Developing the empirical method based on observation and experiment, Alhazen is considered the greatest Muslim physicist and the most significant figure in the history of optics between antiquity and the seventeenth century. Inventing a camera obscura, Alhazen rebuilt our conception of eyesight. His theory of vision was enormously prominent and much of our understanding of optics and light is based upon his groundbreaking discoveries. He began his criticism of emission by describing what happens when people are exposed to bright lights. No matter what the light source, the effect of bright lights was always the same. What this indicates to Alhazen is that light entering into the eye from an external source had some serious function in eyesight. Respecting observation, experiment and empirical method, Suhrawardi, the father of Illumination School, argues all theories of vision and rejects them just by mere reasoning. Suhrawardi validates his own Illuminationist method by scientists’ empirical method. So, I will argue, he is not to deny empirical aspect of Alhazen’s theory of vision. In an allegory, I will use the camera, representing the whole process of a human vision, while I use “beyond camera” for the embodiment that allows for the unfolding of a human soul’s position in the process of vision. What Alhazen is speaking of, we might call the process within the camera; while what Suhrawardi is speaking of, we could name the process behind the camera.

Human being is ontologically a relational being living with others in organized communities and institutions. By focusing on the intersubjective and collective levels of human experience, this essay considers the possibility of a critical dialogue between Paul Ricœur’s and Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological works in the direction of a renewed socio-phenomenological approach to social reality. Through reference to Ricœur’s interpretation of the most important of Husserl’s writing presented in his 1967 collection of essays entitled Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology and Schütz’s masterpiece The Phenomenology of the Social World, this article will show a remarkable continuity and a coherent complementarity between these two authors. I begin with a broad framing of Husserl’s second epoché or reduction to the sphere of ownness as performed within the egological sphere, and then turn to Ricœur’s and Schütz’s critiques of the Husserlian conception of intersubjectivity. These reflections will lead us to discuss the inconsistency of Husserl’s idea of the intersubjective acceptance of the common objective nature and his formulation of the higher-order case of communal constitution.